Many companies with products and service offer an automated telephone response system or a website or both.
A user doing business or intending to do so with the company, could visit the website, potentially create a profile in a secure location and go about doing business. A website could have an internet version and a mobile version tailored to be viewed on a smaller form factor mobile device. In the meantime, to extract the best service and ensure seamless experience, many companies offer thin client user mobile applications or apps residing on the mobile device.
A user could do business either in person (e.g. in a bank), via the Internet, via a mobile app, or via a voice or telephone call.
In the case of a phone channel, an automated telephone response system is a telephone based communication technology that provides a waiting party with services based upon a waiting party's responses to various prompts. A product or service provider, a queuing party, will typically publish a telephone number and connect the telephone line to a computer system that detects voice and touch tones from an incoming telephone call. The queuing party then creates a series of messages that are accessed by the waiting party. The messages typically give menu choices or information that the waiting party can choose from by either voice response or touching a number on their telephone. Such automated telephone response systems include Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, Automatic Call Distributors (ACD), Private Branch Exchanges (PBX), and Voice Over IP (VoIP) systems, to name a few.
An information system like an automated telephone response system or a website or mobile app can also provide more complex services and give dynamically created messages. There are static and dynamic contents. While, for instance, a financial institution, may have a code for displaying or a script or a pre-recorded messages for speaking their mailing address, or for local branch locations, they will also provide services such as account balance information, payment due date, or the ability to make a payment over the telephone or via a web browser or a mobile application. When a user wishes to know their account balance, the automated telephone response system or the website may enquire about the account number or user login information, the user name or other identifying information such as a customer PIN number or other authentication factors such as answer to predetermined questions.
One disadvantage of service centers is that different options for a user to get to a desired end are often siloed and don't talk to each other. For example, a customer trying do an online transaction on a website might need to talk to a representative briefly to resolve an issue which is not part of the menu. Moreover, upon switching to that representative the user has to start the whole transaction over (i.e. the context is not maintained).
Other examples may involve a customer who would like to hang up the phone and continue a transaction on a computer or mobile device. Yet other examples might be handing a call from one device, say a landline phone, to another device, like a mobile phone, or switching to a larger form factor for more clarity and functionality.
From the foregoing, it will be apparent that there remains a need to improve the user experience with siloed systems or an integrated information delivery system, so that the context of any transaction is maintained while switching between those systems.